Trump Derangement Syndrome 101: A Primer

College professors and their minions lost a presidential election for the first time in eight years and don’t know how to handle it.

On college campuses, puppies, coloring books and crying towels are all the rage as professors and students alike try to come to terms with the election results. When we go to the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in January we will be on the lookout for thumb-sucking and security blankets.

“It’s hard not to see Trump’s triumph as a repudiation of everything that universities stand for: free speech, open inquiry, inclusion, and civility; logic, reason and the relentless pursuit of truth and wisdom,” NYU’s Eric Klinenberg wrote in The Chronicle Review on November 25, 2016. (Actually, from what we’ve seen, “everything that universities stand for” is most endangered by denizens of the universities themselves: Tufts student government, for example, voted down the First Amendment.)

“Academe, as it turns out, has been a very safe space for loathing Donald Trump,” Jack Stripling wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education. But actually liking him is quite another story.

“On several college campuses, the mere appearance of Donald Trump’s name written in chalk fueled unrest along racial lines,” Stripling wrote in an article which appeared on November 18, 2016. Delta State University and Emory were two of these, according to Stripling.

Really, how did all of those voters who did not vote for President Obama manage to go through eight years of seeing that familiar “O” logo without flipping out? And no one even gave them a puppy!

Author

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.

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